Close Read: Saving the Plane

“When you hear a pop on the plane, you’re awake, trust me,” Jasper Schuringa told CNN. “I just jumped. I didn’t think. I went over there and tried to save the plane.” Schuringa was one of the passengers on Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day who acted quickly and decisively when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly began setting off something incendiary. Schuringa tried to extinguish the burning object with his own bare hands. We don’t quite know yet what Abdulmutallab was all about. But we know that, as on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, one defense that made a difference, when things like airport security screenings failed, was heroic passengers. This was a narrow miss; this could have been an awful holiday.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is twenty-three, and has told authorities that someone from Al Qaeda gave him the chemicals and syringe he had “sewn into his underwear,” the Times reported, although it’s not clear that he did. According to the Washington Post, he

grew up amid extraordinary privilege, a wealthy Nigerian banker’s son who attended top international schools.

His father reportedly told the American Embassy in Nigeria that his son had become an extremist. The result seems to have been that the son’s name was put on a list, which brings us to one of the harder parts of this story to follow: the explication of the various lists agencies keep of people who cause concern. Politico has a primer, along with some good questions from Laura Rozen. Abdulmutallab was on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, or TIDE, which should not be confused with the Terrorist Screening Data Base, or T.S.D.B. Neither is the list of people who can’t get on a plane, or the “selectee” list of those who get extra screening. Does anyone read these lists? And, when they do, for what? One wonders if the lists are mainly used to pay tribute to the cleverness of their acronyms, rather than to make anyone safer. What is a “Datamart Environment”? A cloud of names? There are more than half a million names on TIDE, and just fourteen thousand selectees. And what are selectees being selected for? Having their socks taken off as well as their shoes? A secondary screening might have stopped Abdulmutallab, but, given the limits and arbitrary qualities of airport security procedures, it might not have.

Security is being increased in response to the incident, which makes sense, even if, at first glance, some of the measures now being taken do not. For the next few days at least, for the last hour of a flight, there is to be nothing in your lap—“not even a paperback novel,” according to the New York Post—and no going to the bathroom, not even for small children. The hijackers on the two planes that hit the World Trade Center acted in the first, not last, hour of multi-hour flights, but never mind. The real concern may be terrorists exploiting the chaos caused by wailing preschoolers. Pilots are also not supposed to mention any landmarks or cities their planes are flying over—pay no attention to those lights outside the window. How does that help? A terrorist might be expected to have looked up the route. Before we decide to, say, turn off all the lights and hood or drop cones of silence on everyone in the air, it is worth remembering that it was alert passengers, looking around and getting out of their seats, who saved the flight on Christmas. On September 11th, having information (from telephone calls, from talking to each other) helped the passengers on United 93 realize what was happening and what needed to be done. They wrenched their plane away from terrorists, giving up their own lives. Abdulmutallab reportedly covered himself in a blanket to set off his device—perhaps this is the final excuse the airlines need to do away with blankets, along with snacks and everything else. One would be glad to do all of it, of course, if one thought that it made us safer, and was not just an odd ritual.

Good airline security with well-trained screeners and innovative technology is expensive. But would it be nearly as expensive as the trillion dollars we are poised to spend in Afghanistan? It could keep us safer than the war.

There are all sorts of distractions in the news. It’s nothing next to the mystery of Abdulmutallab’s motives, but expect plenty of speculation in the coming days about why Urban Meyer is leaving his job as the University of Florida football coach. He had twenty-four million dollars left on his contract, but the job seems to have been bad for his health.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.